Monthly Archives: July 2017

Search engine delistings can make it difficult for users to find their way to free knowledge. Photo by Abrget47j, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Last October, the Wikimedia Foundation filed a petition with the French Supreme Court opposing the worldwide application of the right to be forgotten or right to erasure. This legal doctrine requires search engines to remove (or “delist”) certain information from search results when requested appropriately by European citizens.

In May 2015, the French data protection authority (the CNIL) ordered Google to expand the geographic reach of delistings, and remove the requested information from all of its domains, for users throughout the world, regardless of whether the governing law in their country was similar or distinct. When Google’s offer of a compromise was rejected, it chose not to comply with the order, and challenged it before the Conseil d’État, the French Supreme Court. In our filing, the Wikimedia Foundation argued that delisting, if determined to be appropriate under a given jurisdiction’s laws, should not be expanded to affect search results worldwide. We explained the impact that search engine delistings have on the Wikimedia projects, in making it more difficult for users around the world to find accurate, well-sourced information.

We now provide a brief update on the progress of our petition and Google’s appeal. The French Supreme Court has turned for guidance to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest court in the European Union (EU) responsible for interpreting EU law. In the EU, national courts may refer questions to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling to ensure that they are uniformly interpreting EU law. In a ruling (in French) issued July 19, 2017, the Conseil d’État accepted our petition to intervene, among others, and asked the ECJ to answer the following questions. First, does the right to delist mean that search engines must deindex links on all domains, or is the scope of delisting limited to the European Union? Further, if the scope is limited to the EU, should the delisting take place only on the national domain of the requester, or across all EU domains? Finally, should geoblocking be used to ensure searchers in the same country as the requester do not receive the delisted results? After the ECJ rules on these questions, the case will return to the Conseil d’État.

As we mentioned in an earlier blog post, a large proportion of Wikimedia project traffic originates from search engines. The delisting of links in search results makes it difficult for people to find and access neutral, reliable information on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. When we receive notice that a project page has been removed from search engine results due to a delisting request, we publicly post these notices for the Wikimedia community’s reference. The global extension of search engine delistings sets a dangerous precedent for how information is shared, documented, and disseminated around the world, reaching far beyond the the Wikimedia projects. Worldwide removal orders are recent, and troubling, trend; on July 20, we blogged about a Canadian Supreme Court decision that similarly calls for Google to remove search results across borders.

No single country or region should be able to control what information the entire world may access. If upheld, the CNIL’s order may encourage countries with weak protections for human rights to require the worldwide removal of important information regarding authorities’ abuses of power, dissenting political opinions, or other crucial topics. The removal of content, particularly in such contexts, fundamentally undermines the Wikimedia vision of a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of human knowledge. We hope that the ECJ will conclude that search engine delistings ordered by a particular court should not extend across the globe. We will continue to provide you with updates as the case proceeds.

* Special thanks to Claire Rameix-Séguin and François Gilbert of SCP Baraduc-Duhamel-Rameix for their representation of the Wikimedia Foundation in this case, to Jacob Rogers, Stephen LaPorte, and Jan Gerlach of the Wikimedia Foundation, and to Diana Lee for assistance in preparing this blog post.

The Asian Athletics Championships is an intra-continental sports event organized bi-annually since 1973. The 22nd championship was held in July at the Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar, India, where 655 athletes from 41 countries participated in 21 games. The Odisha Wikipedia community worked with the event organizers in different ways, to document the event on Wikipedia, by holding edit-a-thons (editing workshops), to improve Wikipedia’s content about the championships and releasing official photos of the event under free Creative Commons licenses.

The original plan was for the Indian city of Ranchi, Jharkhand to host the 2017 athletics, but plans changed 90 days before the event when Bhubaneswar was selected as a venue instead. Preparing the Kalinga Stadium and getting ready for the championships in that short period was a challenge for the organizers. However, the state government of Odisha stepped in to assist, and as part of that freely shared knowledge from the championships on Wikimedia projects.

The local Wikipedia community, along with the WikiTungi project in Bhubaneswar, were invited by R. Vineel Krishna, the State Department’s Director of Sports and Youth Services, to organize an edit-a-thon for the Championships. The scope was to improve Wikipedia’s content about the participating Asian athletes.

Before the event, existing Wikipedia articles provided little information on the biographies and accomplishments of some of the participating athletes. Odia Wikipedians collaborated with the Sports and Youth Services Department of Odisha to bridge the dearth of information.

Edit-a-thon participants gathered at the office of CSM Technologies, an event partner for the championships. Fifteen Wikimedians from Bhubaneswar and Puri WikiTungi, with some CSM staff members and new editors participated in the edit-a-thon.

The event started with a basic Wikipedia orientation session for new participants. There was no Wikipedia article for the championships in Odia language, so participants created it in addition to improving the English Wikipedia article. Along with that, 10 new articles were improved and created on both Odia and English Wikipedia. The 2017 Championships page on the English Wikipedia received over 100,000 views during the championships week.

“Wikipedia has been the one-stop source of knowledge for me,” says Alankar Devta, an edit-a-thon participant. “It has helped me learn a lot and prepare for competitions. This is the first time, I got a chance to take part in any Wikipedia edit-a-thon. Apart from that, the articles about the athletes taking part in this year’s Championships are of great help for the readers who may want to search for the athletes with expectations to find useful information about them.”

Wikimedia community members were offered passes to attend the opening ceremony and take photos. We spent four hours taking photos of the 41 participating teams, athletes and cultural events. All were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Nearly 19% of the photos taken at the opening ceremony are used on Wikipedia articles.

A major outcome of the edit-a-thon was releasing the content and images of the championship’s official website under a Creative Commons license. 286 images from the websites were added to Wikimedia Commons, of which 47.2% are used on Wikipedia in several languages.

The collection includes images of the athletes during their Heats, Semi Finals, Final, and Medal ceremonies of all four days. 127 images are used in 269 pages on Wikipedia in 27 languages, and many articles added their first image from this collection. WikiProject Women in Red used the images in many female athlete articles. The Odia Wikipedia community and the Centre for Internet and Society are also planning to work with the Wikipedia Asian Month competition to use these images to illustrate Wikipedia articles they work on, in their next edition.

“I have worked with the Women in Red project since it started,” says Wikipedian Victuallers, who has created many articles for participating female athletes in the Asian Athletics Championships. “Over the past two years, we have helped raise the percentage [of female biographies on the English Wikipedia] from 15.5 to 17%. One of the things that hold us back, though, is that women are less likely to have images available. It’s, therefore, amazing to find that a major athletic event has released hundreds of images with a CC BY-SA license. Participating athletes are all notable and women are fairly well represented. I have downloaded over 100 pictures and cropped group photos to create portraits. We’ve been tweeting the new articles and pictures on @WikiWomenInRed and trying to encourage all to “one up” the Odisha people. It’s a great success and we need more people to follow suit.”

With such collaborative spirit from the Government institutes, the Odia community is planning to get more content from Odisha under a free license. The community has also partnered with the Bhubaneswar Development Authority, to run a global edit-a-thon named Bhubaneswar Heritage Editathon, for documenting the culture and heritage monuments of the city.

In brief

300,000 images from Auckland Museum are now open for free use: The Auckland War Memorial Museum has released over 300,000 images from their collection under Creative Commons CC BY and CC0 licenses. “Our collections are open by default,” Sarah Powell, the museum’s Rights Specialist, wrote on the Auckland Museum blog, “which means that images of collection objects for which no copyright exists, or where copyright has expired, we allow reuse for any purpose, including commercial, as long as Auckland Museum is identified as the source.”

Seattle Wikinic: On 16 July, Wikimedians in Seattle gathered for this year’s summer Wikinic. Every year the group gathers for a picnic in the summer where Wikipedians can play, eat and spend some leisure time together. This year’s Wikinic was held at the Gas Works Park in Seattle.

Wikipedia and tourism: Improving Wikipedia’s content about your city may increase tourist visits to it by 9% according to an experiment conducted by economists in Spain. To measure the impact of improving a Wikipedia entry about a German city on the German Wikipedia, the group improved it using information translated from other languages. They assessed the changes in tourist visits during the next season compared to previous years, where in 95% of the cases improving the article had a positive impact.

Discover Russia, start from Don: The second round of this thematic writing contest organized by the Russian Wikipedia community is open to Wikipedia user participation in any language on Wikipedia. The contest is dedicated to Rostov Oblast memorable sights, in addition to the rich literary heritage of the Don River Area. More information about the contest and how to participate on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia Library in Kanara: Wikipedians in the Kanara region in India are making progress with their Wikipedia Library program. The program helps provide reliable sources for Wikipedia editors. The Kanara program will support Wikipedians editing in Kannada, Tulu and Konkani languages.

I believe I first heard of Michał Heller in 2008, when he won the Templeton Prize, but it was not until 2010 that I actually read one of his works. I became an avid follower of his work, from books to lectures uploaded online. Knowing this, in 2015 a friend asked me for a list of works to read before meeting with Heller.

See, shortly after the friend asked me that question, I started to wonder how many and which books Heller had actually written, and what fraction of it are the five or so that I had read at that time. There were lists on his homepage and on Polish Wikipedia, but they were both incomplete, outdated, purely chronological (not sorted by topic), and separately counted different editions of the same book. I had enough free time to improve that, and within weeks I posted a sorted list of about 60 books in around 130 editions, with the help of Tomasz Raburski, an administrator on the Polish Wikipedia. Later, I gathered some books from the list, and prepared a longer text on his philosophical and theological views.

After a couple of months, I realised that this work is far more than just entertainment. When Heller gave a public talk in November 2015, he was introduced as an author of more than 60 books. I wondered how the organizers counted that, so that I could compare their list to mine. Surprisingly, they used my list from Polish Wikipedia. They even printed the article and distributed it as a in introductory leaflet for the audience.

Another example of the article’s influence came in October 2016. Heller’s doctorate at Catholic University of Lublin was officially renewed 50 years after awarding it – their way of giving a honorary doctorate when someone has already received one academically. In the ceremony, his work was praised in a speech with structure and sentences that had been clearly inspired by the Wikipedia article. The fact that Wikipedia is used as a source not only by school and university students, but also by university rectors, is an evidence of its power and quality.

Today, the article has been much improved. I expanded the main text with input from Heller’s collaborators in March 2016, and professional photographs taken by Adam Walanus have been added. Much work, however, remains. The article lacks citations in places because I have not read a book references by a previous editor of the article, and I have only read less than half of Heller’s books (much less his hundreds of journal articles), contributing to a selection bias.

The largest problem I face is one of scope: even if the article gains a featured star one day (the highest marker of quality on many Wikipedias), I feel that it will not be enough to summarize his enormous levels of work. Wikipedia generally isn’t a place for an absolutely comprehensive list of an academic’s publications, interviews, talks, lectures, and more.

You could ask why I do all of this, especially given all of the time and work I have and have yet to put in—my career could benefit from pausing this work, for instance.

The answer is that because the world needs it. For one, philosophy is an often misunderstood field—and Heller’s work is less understood than most, as it branches into fields like theoretical physics. A Wikipedia article, written in summary style, is an accessible entry point for people looking to learn more about Heller and his views. Secondly, even faithful followers of his work are unfamiliar with his contributions to theoretical physics and cosmology. Thirdly, Heller is an excellent author in popular science, avoiding common mistakes of bestsellers – e.g. historical and philosophical misunderstandings, or over-sensational claims.

Perhaps even more importantly, however, is Heller’s usefulness in decoding the relationship between science and religion. A major and very public debate has been happening in places all around the world. Some people try to use scientific methods to prove the existence of a god, others try to do the opposite, some take the middle ground and say that the two are completely unrelated, and more.

I believe that these sorts of discussions need people like Heller, who – without pushing their own beliefs – can point to mistakes and misunderstanding made by one and copied by others. I personally don’t always agree with Heller; indeed, some of his work is probably not as good as it can or should be.

If all of Heller’s contributions were already well summarized somewhere on the Internet, whether Wikipedia or elsewhere, I might not read and write as much about it. But it is missing, and I see a need for it, so I persist.

“[Jenkins] decided to focus on inclusivity,” says a Wikipedian who edited the film’s Wikipedia article under the username Classicfilms, “as a way to work through the various complications of gender that seemed to stall the film for two decades.” She continues:

Her vision appears to have worked, particularly with that segment of the population who either grew up reading comic books or playing games related to these comic characters, and I think most would agree, that this is a tough crowd. Thus, part of the success of the film lies in the fact that Jenkins grew up reading Wonder Woman comics and paid respect to the numerous narratives that DC comics introduced over the decades with regard to this character (even when Jenkins made her own signature changes).

Classicfilms first edited an article about a Wonder Woman film back in 2006 when screenwriter Joss Whedon was working on a screenplay for the film. The edits to that page, then titled “Wonder Woman (undeveloped film),” were later merged to the character’s article when the idea of a Wonder Woman film appeared to have stalled.

“I was a huge Wonder Woman fan as a child,” recalls Classicfilms, who now holds a PhD in English literature. “This film is something of a dream come true, despite some valid criticism of it. We’ve had so many Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Hulk films; it was time for a Wonder Woman film.”

“My mother was the one who introduced me to Wonder Woman,” Classicfilms said, as it was “a comic book that she grew up reading after it appeared in the 1940s.” She continues:

I first developed an interest in these genres as a child, when I was the only girl on my street to trade X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Avengers comics with the other boys who read them (mostly from the 1960s and 1970s). I first became interested when I read my brother’s comics and realized that there were some very cool female superheroes, such as the Invisible Woman, The Scarlet Witch, The Wasp, and Medusa.

“The DC spectacular we’ve been waiting for,” the Wall Street Journalproclaimed when Wonder Woman premiered, which triggered over five million views for the Wikipedia articles on each of the film and its heroine on Wikipedia during the month of June.

“It is important to update Wikipedia articles when a movie premieres,” says a Wikipedian who edited the page under the username Dash9Z. “We should have the most up-to-date information, such as premiere date, gross, reviews, etc. One of the best things about Wikipedia is having the latest detailed information all in one place.”

“I edited the Wonder Woman article to ensure that its quality was on par with other superhero films,” Dash9Z told us. “Articles for Marvel Cinematic Universe films are usually pretty good quality, and I want to make sure articles for DC Extended Universe films are also good quality.”

For Dash9Z, character development and portrayal was Wonder Woman‘s key to success because “character bonding is something which was lacking a bit in the DC Extended Universe, so it’s good we got to see it in this film. It’s great DC finally did a Wonder Woman movie.”

On 10–12 June, Iberoconf 2017 was held in Buenos Aires. The event was—now more than ever before—a space to encounter, meet, and share information with local Iberocoop affiliates, all located in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the Americas and Europe. The conference was set up as a space for learning and strategic planning, to better leverage the network’s impact in the movement; as a place to represent local organizations and their communities; and as a space to centralize demands.

Iberocoop has grown a lot in the last three years, and since the last regional meeting in 2014 we have come a long way to be able to hold this year’s meeting. Far from creating quantitative goals related to creating content on different language version Wikipedias, Iberocoop has began establishing long-term goals towards a clear end: to drive better work by local affiliates, so that this can in turn translate into more strategic impact of our network in a regional level. This has been possible because we have shared lessons learned across Iberocoop for the last three years. We have driven, together, dozens of programs, where we created over 7,000 articles. But numbers alone are not representative of our work.

Our challenge was not understanding if we could work together on writing contests and other programs, but rather, to ask ourselves: Do we want to be a program-driven network? Or do we also want to be a mentoring network for our communities, local groups, and for the region?

At Iberoconf 2017, we designed a meeting where the main goal was to acquire relevant knowledge and skills through practice, and applying knowledge together to generate more impact at the regional level.

We carried out this goal through the following shared lessons:

Involving all participants, from the beginning, in the organization of the conference helps to define goals in a more strategic way.

Wikimedia organizations were more than just participants in the conference, playing an active role as counterparts. Through virtual and in-person meetups, and instant message channels like Telegram, we agreed on the current state of the Iberocoop network. Further, we defined the roles and outcomes of the regional meetup in a participatory way, by means of a survey. This allowed us to create a program that was relevant for the needs and demands of the participating organizations.

We designed participatory learning spaces to promote the construction of a support and cooperation network that is stronger and more professionalized.

We avoided session formats like lectures and one-sided presentations. These types of sessions were very present in Iberoconf 2014, and they are usually led by the stronger affiliate groups, which restricts participation from organizations with a different development level. They leave little room for discussion and participation of all groups. For this reason, we promoted hands-on workshops, where working in groups could guarantee a similar learning outcome.

We created broad and flexible debate spaces, some created on the spot during the event, to help ensure concrete outcomes.

We organized a structured conference with flexible slots in its debate spaces. We provided general instructions, so that all participants would feel comfortable, and we granted facilitation of these spaces to an external contractor, to guarantee fair participation for all. These spaces defined their content according to the needs and wishes expressed by members of the network; openness and coordination were key to make this happen. As a result, we managed to achieve concrete outcomes, especially in relation to Iberocoop’s stance in the movement strategy for 2030, and also setting concrete demands in an open letter addressed to the Wikimedia Foundation (known as the Buenos Aires Letter).

We made the event into a meeting space to empower the local community and invite new participants to join.

Engaging the local community in international events allows for them to have a better understanding of the movement they belong to. The community played a key part in the organization of the event, and they were involved as mentors of the meeting to incorporate newcomers. For the first time, this leading role allowed that representatives of other affiliates, new editors, and local partners could be part of a regional gathering in an active, inclusive and participatory way.

We are pleased to announce that the Brazilian Court of Appeals for the state of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil’s second highest court tier) recently ruled in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation in the lawsuit brought by Brazilian musician Rosana Fiengo (also known as Rosanah Fienngo).

In a previous blog post, we announced that the 6th Civil Court of Jacarepaguá in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ruled in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation in Ms. Fiengo’s lawsuit. Ms. Fiengo went to court to dispute facts in a Portuguese Wikipedia article detailing her career. She claimed that the article’s facts constituted an invasion of her privacy. Wikipedia volunteers had included facts supported by citations that pointed towards interviews that Ms. Fiengo had given to the media in the past.

The Civil Court ruled that using information Ms. Fiengo had previously and personally divulged to the media could not now be considered an invasion of privacy. Ms. Fiengo and her legal representatives decided to continue fighting the case, but the Brazilian Court of Appeals for the state of Rio de Janeiro has now affirmed the lower court’s decision.

The Appellate Court’s decision sought to balance the right to privacy with the freedom of expression, deciding here that any restrictions on the former set of rights did not outweigh the benefits of preserving the right to free expression. According to the Appellate Court, biography is a form of history, and censoring facts about history is an unpalatable restriction on the freedom of expression. Additionally, the right to privacy for any particular person may vary — it may be more significant or less significant depending on the actions and career choices of the person in question. The courts have established that the public may have a protectable interest in learning about certain personal facts of well-known artists, and those facts in turn may inspire members of the public to read and write about those individuals. As illustrated by this decision, the Brazilian courts weigh the rights of the public to access such information when they balance those rights against individual celebrities’ rights to privacy.

The Appellate Court found in favor of Wikimedia based on the importance of the public’s right to access information about public figures. On the additional claim of sharing false information, the Court pointed to footnotes in the original article which acknowledged that some of the information was contested, and the Court went as far as to say that Wikimedia would not be liable and only be responsible for taking down content if the content was found to be false and defamatory.

The Brazilian courts thus have upheld the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission by protecting access to information and the free sharing of knowledge. Wikimedia will continue to assert the rights of its community as cases such as this one arise.

We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to Tania Liberman, Eloy Rizzo, Daniel Shingai and André Muriel from KLA – Koury Lopes Advogados for their excellent representation in this matter. We would also like to extend special thanks to legal fellow Alex Shahrestani for his assistance in preparing this blog post.

Archives, the repositories of primary sources for everything from businesses to governments to churches, are usually full of dead-tree paper hard copies. By their very definition, they’re dead.

But archivists and curators see things differently, especially those at the Archivio Videoludico (Video game archive) of the Cineteca di Bologna. Access to the institution is open to the public and free of charge, which they believe keeps it “alive”—the ongoing study and research can give sources a “new life” by exposing them to new audiences.

With this in mind, the archive decided to collaborate with Wikimedia editors to put on an edit-a-thon devoted to the history of video gaming. What better chance to give their content new life than by sharing them with a wider audience? From a very small audience, maybe a single researcher, to a huge one—Wikipedia.

The archive, located in the Northern Italian city of Bologna, was established in 2009 as a space for safeguarding the history of gaming, to archive and promote videogaming topics, and analyze and study the social and cultural importance of the medium. As of 2017, the archive contains more than 5,000 titles and 34 gaming platforms that users can access, along with books, dissertations, movies, and magazines about video games.

Fifteen people—more than half of which were women—gathered for the tour at the Cineteca. Anna Fiaccarini, the head of the Foundation’s library and non-film archives, showed us pictures from the early 1900s, paintings for movie posters, and even drawings of never shot scenes from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Participants were a mixed audience of old-school Wikipedians, video games scholars, and enthusiasts. Some traveled for up to three hours to join the event.

By the end of the edit-a-thon, thirteen articles had been modified, with more than 60 new references added.

Back in 2005, when some of the articles modified by the participants were created, there were very few reliable sources for video games available online and in Italian. Twelve years later, magazines are available and indexed at the Archivio Videoludico, allowing us to complete and expand those articles by adding sources in the reader’s language.

———

Irene Rubino was one of the participants in the edit-a-thon, and had one of the longest travel times of anyone there (about three hours from her hometown, Pisa, to Bologna). “I had quite the experience,” she said. “It was my first approach to Wikipedia as an author of its contents. I was already familiar with the free encyclopedia, of course … but being behind the scenes is oddly different. Besides, it was fun and also a chance to learn something new.

“Writing for Wikipedia is no different from ‘ordinary’ research work, except that everyone is able to read what you write without having to buy extraordinarily expensive peer-reviewed journals,” she added. “It’s a fairly more democratic approach to knowledge.”

“I had never seen a Commodore 64 (an 8-bit home computer from the early 1980s) before, so I was thrilled at first,” Rubino said. “We were given several game reviews and also a complete sitography to browse. However, I often got lost in the process: different ideas kept popping up page after page.”

“I also discovered the article I had chosen was written by our tutor, Giuseppe Profiti,” Rubino said. “At first I felt somewhat embarrassed. Then I realized that for the first time I had the chance to interact with the author of a page I was editing. You could never do that with a print encyclopedia.”

Rubino was intrigued by the high number of women who participated. A study published in September 2014 by the Internet Advertising Bureau shows that 52 percent of the gaming audience is made up of women.

“Too bad women are still largely absent in the industry, both as creators and characters of video games,” Rubino said. “Taking notice that not only women play videogames, but show an active interest in writing about them too, could be a first step towards a more equal approach.”

“I’ve always been interested in video games, so reading and writing about them felt almost natural … somehow like a second skin,” Rubino added. “Of course, I am looking forward to the next Wikimedia project. I think it should involve as many nerds—I mean, people—as possible. I suggest the organizers give participants more time to research and write and especially to talk to each other. Most of the time we worked on our own without coordinating.”

On 6 July 2017, Wikimedia Sweden (Sverige) lost a case on the freedom of panorama in the Swedish Patent and Market Court.

In 2016, clarifying what had been an ambiguous Swedish law about the right to photograph public artwork, the Supreme Court of Sweden ruled that works freely displayed in public could be photographed but, irrationally (in our view), could not be shared online. Following that ruling, the case in question, a dispute between Bildkonst Upphovsrätt i Sverige (BUS), a Swedish association that represents artists in copyright matters, and Offentlig Konst i Sverige, a Swedish website run by Wikimedia Sweden showing images and information about public monuments, was sent to the Swedish Patent and Market Court. That court has now issued a ruling against Wikimedia Sweden, a decision based on last year’s unfortunate Supreme Court decision.

The decision is a blow to the Wikimedia movement’s mission to make knowledge and art available to people around the world. Ironically, although photographs of publicly displayed (and often, publicly funded) art cannot be shared online without the artist’s permission, such photographs may be freely commercialized and distributed when in physical print.

“The outcome is a tragedy, because it renders public art less accessible and less public. Our intention has always been to give public art the kind of visibility it deserves. It is remarkable how, in a digital age, sharing photos in digital media is not OK if there is a work of public art visible in that photo,” says John Andersson, Executive Director of Wikimedia Sweden.

While the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Sweden will continue to advocate for the free expression of contributors to the Wikimedia projects and, more generally, for free and worldwide access to knowledge, Wikimedia Sweden has determined that pursuing a further appeal does not make sense at this point. Therefore, this marks the end of the case. The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Sweden will continue to pursue public education about freedom of panorama and Wikimedia Sweden is urging the Swedish legislature to improve the law to allow digital sharing that matches the expectations of the majority of the public.

This ruling may have broad consequences across many scenarios, affecting the taking of photographs in public spaces, above and beyond the immediate application to three pictures on a not-for-profit Wikimedia Sweden website. For example, based on this ruling, local residents or tourists who take selfies, or who seek to photograph the scenery to share with friends and family, may accidentally invoke copyright protections while sharing their photos on social media. That’s one of the major risks associated with what could become a dangerous precedent from Sweden’s Supreme Court and the Patent and Market Court. The works of art at issue are publicly visible and purposely not restricted from general public view; they are not inside of a gallery. So we find it all the more troubling that the mere act of sharing a photo depicting a public place can be deemed to be copyright infringement.

“Copyright is complex and largely incomprehensible,” Andersson says. “This ruling asserts that there is a difference in terms of user rights between digital and print media as photos of these works of art can for example be printed as postcards and used for commercial purposes. Digital non-profit projects like the websites Offentligkonst.se and Wikipedia, however, must pay for using the very same photos. In a society looking to fully enter a digital era, it is unreasonable to undermine the use of digital media in this way. The legislation clearly must be revised.”

Furthermore, when art is made available to the public, either by virtue of public funding, distribution through freely licensed photographs (as was the case with the photos in this lawsuit), or by intentional placement in full view of the public, then access to that art should not be subject to arbitrary restrictions. Restrictions such as this reduce public access to art, which in turn harms local culture, artists, and creativity across the globe.

Wikimedia Sweden is seeking donations to pay the cost of legal fees and fines it has incurred or that were imposed by the court (amounting to about $89,000 US) while it defended against this aggressive copyright scheme.

“We’re hoping to find support through a crowdfunding campaign to cover costs and to advocate for changes to relevant Swedish and international legislation,” Andersson says. “If you think the court ruling is unreasonable you’re welcome to make a donation. Supporters can either use Swedish payment app Swish at 1232692697 or visit http://ift.tt/2ttzjLP to donate. Simply add “BUS” in the comment section and all funds will be put towards this cause.”

Jacob Rogers, Legal CounselWikimedia Foundation

Special thanks to Richard Lenemark and his firm, Advokatfirman Delphi, for legal assistance on this case, along with Wikimedia legal fellow Alex Shahrestani for his assistance in preparing this blog.

The Annunciation, painting by Petrus Christus, CC0. One of 375,000 images donated to Wikimedia Commons by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Open Access Policy initiative. One of the articles translated by the winner of the Met Open Access Artworks Challenge.

I’m reminded of this immense scope every day: when I walk through the museum’s galleries, which hold 5,000 years of art history, and in taking an elevator that sits between adjoining halls devoted to Ancient Rome and Oceania. All of these historical public domain artworks, the great majority of this encyclopedic museum, are part of our project.

As a lifelong New Yorker who had the pleasure and mind-expanding experience of growing up with this museum, and has been fascinated since the early GLAM days of 2009 by the possibility of sharing it on Wikimedia Commons, the opening up of this collection (and the opportunity to be a part of the process) has meant a lot to me.

As time has gone on this year, and as over 300,000 are now uploaded, I can appreciate better the scale and complexity of both that original goal and especially the necessary bridge-building that goes beyond it.

For example, there is no standard way to upload such large image batches to Commons. After going through several options, each valuable but imperfect in their own way, the tool I chose for the task was GWToolset, which is able to relatively easily convert the CSV metadata of the Met Open Access release, providing relevant categories and descriptions for fields on the Information template on Commons. At the same time, we sought to expand the range of Met artworks available with distinct Wikidata items, adding and importing data for all of the collection highlights from the museum website, including the non-paintings and three-dimensional works that were often missing. All of this was immensely assisted by supporters from WikiProject Sum of All Paintings, which has been active in creating Wikidata items for paintings in particular from all museums, and is now helping us with the Met project in all artwork genres.

On the Wikipedia side, we have renewed and developed WikiProject Met for the museum, set out a census of existing artwork articles (many of which were uncategorized or unassociated with the WikiProject), and began chronicling a spontaneous burst of new articles inspired by the first image uploads in February.

The author in the middle with George Sferra, the MET Associate Collections Manager to his left and Donald LaRocca, the Arms and Armor curator. Photo by Nealstimler, CC0.

I’ve found that a Wikimedia-compatible high-quality image is a powerful spur to start or improve an article on an artwork, making the writer’s text more meaningful and appreciated. We worked with curators to help select artwork articles, including with the Department of Arms and Armor to start Armor of Emperor Ferdinand I, which is one of only a handful of articles on historical suits of armor. This had some interest as an underdeveloped genre of works on Wikipedia, and connected also to a number of new articles written within the scope of WikiProject Fashion.

In addition to the spontaneous efforts prompted by the availability of new images, we also encouraged editors to contribute in structured ways. At the museum itself, an edit-a-thon was hosted by the Thomas J. Watson Library, a pioneer of Wikimedia projects at the Met predating the Open Access initiative, and participants at the event benefited greatly from the librarian expertise present.

A strength of the edit-a-thon and the Wikimedia projects at the Met generally has been the ability to bring together interdisciplinary collaboration, with the museum’s Digital, Education, and Libraries departments all contributing in true encyclopedic fashion. One highlight result from the Thomas J. Watson Library edit-a-thon was Hiawatha and Minehaha, a pair of busts by Edmonia Lewis, the article developed by artist Heather Hart of the Black Lunch Table project. You can read a Met librarian’s account of the edit-a-thon at a blog post in the Met Libraries’ In Circulation by William Blueher

And at the same time globally, the Met Open Access Artworks Challenge was held online, encouraging contributions on Commons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia in multiple languages, and modeled on the UNESCO Challege. In a dozen languages from Albanian to Ukrainian, articles were translated or written afresh, and even more languages had images added to illustrate their subjects. The first-place winner, Marisa Lobato Roig, completed many translations to Spanish and other languages, including that of an Annunciation by Petrus Christus. Also online, a specialized edit-a-thon was held with WikiProject Women in Red focusing on works by women artists in the museum’s collection, including a number of entirely new articles such as Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes.

To facilitate the museum’s edit-a-thon and the global challenge, we sought to develop new Wikidata-based tools to help with the creation of new draft articles. The Mbabel (“Museum of Babel”) template was developed to auto-generate a basic draft article and infobox for any artworks at the Met or elsewhere, which would then be further developed before publication. This Wikidata functionality for the artwork infobox is now in the process of being improved and universalized on English Wikipedia with a prototype by Mike Peel.

For the next six months, we look forward to deepening and regularizing community and museum relationships, engaging with more online and offline campaigns, further technological tools and collaborations, and generally forward the multi-form goal of working to “Wiki-fy the Met, and Met-ify the Wiki”.

Richard Knipel, Wikimedian-in-ResidenceMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Contents

Chilling effects: The impact of surveillance awareness on Wikipedia pageviews

A paper in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal[1] finds that the traffic to privacy-sensitive articles on the English Wikipedia dropped significantly around June 2013, when the existence of the US government’s PRISM online surveillance program was first revealed based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. As stated by the author, Jon Penney, the study “is among the first to evidence—using either Wikipedia data or web traffic data more generally—how government surveillance and similar actions may impact online activities, including access to information and knowledge online.” It received wide media attention upon its release, as already reported last year in the Signpost.

The paper is part of a growing body of literature that studies the effect of external events on Wikipedia pageviews (for another example, see our previous issue: “How does unemployment affect reading and editing Wikipedia ? The impact of the Great Recession“). The 66-page paper stands out for its methodological diligence, devoting much space to explaining and justifying its data selection and statistical approach, and to checking the robustness of the results. The framework was adapted from an earlier MIT study that had similarly examined the effect of the Snowden revelations on Google search traffic for sensitive terms, finding a statistically significant reduction of 5%. The author emphasizes the higher quality of the Wikipedia data: “unlike Google Trends, the Wikimedia Foundation provides a wealth of data on key elements of its site, including article traffic data, which can provide a more accurate picture as to any impact or chilling effects identified.”

To generate a list of Wikipedia articles that could be considered privacy sensitive in the context of US government surveillance, the author used a (publicly available) set of terms that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) specifies as related to terrorism. The corresponding Wikipedia articles (48 altogether) include dirty bomb, suicide attack, nuclear enrichment (a redirect) and eco-terrorism. To verify the assumption that these topics are indeed considered as privacy sensitive by Internet users, a survey among 415 Mechanical Turk users asked them to rate each, e.g. on whether they would be likely to delete their browser history after accessing information about it.

To examine the impact on traffic, the paper uses the time series of monthly pageviews for the 48 articles (81 million views altogether, from January 2012 to August 2014). It is divided into the periods before and after the June 2013 “exogeneous shock”. As a first finding, the author notes that the average monthly views in the “after” period are lower – but points out that such considerations (which e.g. form part of the difference in differences approach in the paper on unemployment mentioned above) are too simplistic to show an actual effect, e.g. because this could merely be caused by an overall declining traffic trend. (Although not stated directly in the paper, this is indeed the case, as the study is only based on desktop pageviews, which have been gradually replaced by mobile views in recent years. The Wikimedia Foundation makes combined mobile/desktop pageview datasets available going back to 2015.)

The author then turns to a more sophisticated statistical method known as interrupted time series analysis (ITS). It involves a “segmented regression analysis”: linear trend lines are calculated separately for the timespans before and after June 2013, providing information both on the slope (growth/decrease rate) within each and on the size of the mismatch (if any) where the two segments intersect. This method indicates “an immediate drop-off of over 30% of overall views” following the June 2013 revelations. To further exclude the possibility that the results for these terrorism-related articles “may simply reflect overall Wikipedia article view traffic trends”, an analogous ITS analysis is conducted for the pageviews to all Wikipedia articles.

The author points out the importance of the results for the Wikimedia Foundation’s current lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of the NSA surveillance of Internet traffic.

Briefly

Conferences and events

The Komodo dragon is the most popular reptile according to Wikipedia pageview data.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

“Using Wikipedia page views to explore the cultural importance of global reptiles”[2] From the abstract: “We analysed all page views of reptile species viewed during 2014 in all of Wikipedia’s language editions. We compared species’ page view numbers across languages and in relationship to their spatial distribution, phylogeny, threat status and various other biological attributes. We found that the three species with most page views are shared across major language editions, beyond these, page view ranks of species tend to be specific to particular language editions. Interest within a language is mostly focused on reptiles found in the regions where the language is spoken. Overall, interest is greater for reptiles that are venomous, endangered, widely distributed, larger and that have been described earlier.” (See also university news release and Wiki Edu blog post)

“Gender Gap in Wikipedia Editing: A Cross Language Comparison”[3] From the abstract and conclusions section: “This study is guided by two research questions: RQ1: What is the percentage of users who set their gender in different language editions of Wikipedia? RQ2: Among those who express gender, what percentages comprise female and male contributors? [… We] compared gender across 289 language editions of Wikipedia. […] We conclude that the differences in the amount of users expressing their gender can be explained by the differences in the interfaces, both the visibility of gender and the incentive to express it, especially during the process of the new user-profile creation [… The] gender gap is not just present in the English Wikipedia but it is diffused across all language editions of Wikipedia. However, there are notable differences: in some Wikipedias (Slovenian, Estonian, Lithuanian) the percentage of women is close to 40 percent, in others (Bengali, Hindi) it is around 4 percent, while on the English Wikipedia, the chosen baseline given its international nature reaches 17 percent. Notably, languages whose editions of Wikipedia have larger shares of women tend to be spoken in countries with a larger participation of women in science.” (See also these general notes on the data source underlying the paper)

“Research on Wikipedia Vandalism: a brief literature review”[4] From the abstract: “This paper performs a literature review on the subject, with the goal of identifying the main research topics and approaches, methods and techniques used. Results showed that the authorship of three-quarters of papers are from Computer Science researchers. Main topic is the detection of vandalism, although there is a increasing interest about content quality. The most commonly used technique is machine learning, based on feature analysis. It draws attention to the lack of research on information behavior of vandals.”

“Wikipedia and participatory culture: Why fans edit”[5] From the abstract: “Building on previous research, I argue that fans want to take part in the production of the media that they enjoy, that Wikipedia allows editors to create their own paratext (i.e., the Wikipedia article) in relation to a main text (e.g., a movie, a television show, a book series), and that this paratext may be heavily used by the general public. Such usage is a form of implicit approval that affirms the editors’ knowledge and encourages them to make more edits. Thus, Wikipedia validates the fan editor’s work in a way that other outlets for participatory culture (e.g., fan fiction, fan art, songwriting) cannot.”

“WikInfoboxer: A Tool to Create Wikipedia Infoboxes Using DBpedia”[6] From the abstract: “… we present WikInfoboxer, a tool to help Wikipedia editors to create rich and accurate infoboxes. WikInfoboxer computes attributes that might be interesting for an article and suggests possible values for them after analyzing similar articles from DBpedia. To make the process easier for editors, WikInfoboxer presents this information in a friendly user interface.” (See also a related Wikimedia grant application)

“Answering End-User Questions, Queries and Searches on Wikipedia and its History”[7] From the abstract: “…we describe and compare two user-friendly systems that seek to make the universal knowledge of Web KBs [knowledge bases] available to users who neither know SPARQL, nor the internals of the KBs. … the SWiPE [“Search Wikipedia by example”] system provides a wysiwyg interface that lets users specify powerful queries on the Infoboxes of Wikipedia pages in a query-by-example fashion.” (See also our earlier related coverage: “Searching by example”, “Wikipedia Search Isn’t Necessarily Third BESt”)

“Cultural Differences in the Understanding of History on Wikipedia”[8] From the abstract: “This paper sheds light on cultural differences in the understanding of historical military events between Chinese, English, French, German, and Swedish Wikipedia language editions. […] We identified the most important historical events, mined cross-cultural relations, investigated word usage in war-related pages and performed network, complexity, and sentiment analysis. […] Our findings suggest that World War I and World War II are the most important historical events within English, French, and German cultures and English Wikipedia contains more violence and war-related content, with a higher level of complexity than other language editions.”

“Predicting Importance of Historical Persons Using Wikipedia”[9] From the abstract: “Based on the two well-known lists of the most important people in the last millennium, we look closely into factors that determine significance of historical persons. We predict person’s importance using six classifiers equipped with features derived from link structure, visit logs and article content.”

“Semantic Stability in Wikipedia”[10] From the abstract: “In this paper we assess the semantic stability of Wikipedia by investigating the dynamics of Wikipedia articles’ revisions over time. In a semantically stable system, articles are infrequently edited, whereas in unstable systems, article content changes more frequently. In other words, in a stable system, the Wikipedia community has reached consensus on the majority of articles. […] Our experimental results reveal that […] there are differences on the velocity of the semantic stability process between small and large Wikipedia editions. Small editions exhibit faster and higher semantic stability than large ones. In particular, in large Wikipedia editions, a higher number of successive revisions is needed in order to reach a certain semantic stability level, whereas, in small Wikipedia editions, the number of needed successive revisions is much lower for the same level of semantic stability.”

“The Citizen IS the Journalist: Automatically Extracting News from the Swarm”[11] From the abstract: “… we describe SwarmPulse, a system that extracts news by combing through Wikipedia and Twitter to extract newsworthy items. We measured the accuracy of SwarmPulse comparing it against the Reuters and CNN RSS feeds and the Google News feed. We found precision of 83 % and recall of 15 % against these sources.”

“DePP: A System for Detecting Pages to Protect in Wikipedia”[12] From the abstract: “In this paper we consider for the first time the problem of deciding whether a page should be protected or not in a collaborative environment such as Wikipedia. We formulate the problem as a binary classification task and propose a novel set of features to decide which pages to protect based on (i) users page revision behavior and (ii) page categories. We tested our system, called DePP, on a new dataset we built consisting of 13.6K pages (half protected and half unprotected) and 1.9M edits. Experimental results show that DePP reaches 93.24% classification accuracy and significantly improves over baselines.”

“Bring on Board New Enthusiasts! A Case Study of Impact of Wikipedia Art + Feminism Edit-A-Thon Events on Newcomers”[13] From the abstract: “…our results shows that overall face-to-face edit-a-thons are very successful in attracting and recruiting a large number of newcomers who are more engaged than a random group of newcomers on Wikipedia; however, still a very small percentage of them stay engaged with Wikipedia after the event.”